Back in November 1998, Guy and I went on a trip, organized by Orbotech (where I work), to the MHM (which stands for Merkaz-le-heker-mearot and is pronounced "malham") cave in Har Sdom (Mt. Sodom).
I'll warn you right now. Unless you are an expert caver, don't even think of exploring the cave without a guide.
We started off by hiking up the "mountain". Part way up, there's an entrance to the cave. When you go in this way you go down over a slightly rocky surface. Then the way smooths out. It becomes one of those slopes that you want to run down. Fortunately we had a guide on this trip who insisted that we don't run down the slope because at the end of it, when it's already getting dark and hard to see, there's a 15 m deep hole in the ground.
Climbing up Har Sdom: This is what we looked like at the start of the trip before crawling through the dust and salt for hours.
The cave was fantastic. The mountain is entirely salt. Mostly table salt with the odd bit of mineral mixed in. The cave is 5 km long though we only saw a small part of it. What we saw was really nice though. There were rooms with salt stalagtites and stalagmites, giant salt crystals, vertical tunnels going straight up to the sky, and bats. On the way out the guide pointed in a certain direction and told us to find our own way out. Somehow I was first (since I love to explore, I was quite happy to be first). I'm crawling down this tunnel and it looked like there was no way out of there but to turn back. But as I get to what I'm sure is the end, I find a crack in the ceiling to crawl up through and end up in a large room. Seems I'd missed another such crack earlier on that would have got me up one level higher in the cave and saved a certain amount of belly slithering. The problem was, once we got into this room we still couldn't find our way out and spent another half hour or so searching before finding the tunnel to the exit.
Leon checking out the salt stalactites.
After coming back down the mountain, we found a catered meal waiting for us on tables set up inside another of the cave's entrances. A nice touch I thought.
Then on crossing the road to go back to our cars, we found 2 had been broken into. One woman had her side window smashed and her stereo torn out. And the guide's car was about 20m from where he's parked it with all the wires by the ignition pulled out. For a change the thieves didn't hit us (maybe because we hadn't come on the motorcycle). I have to say it was a very typical end to an outing in Israel.
Thanks to Leon and Cyril for the pictures (I was feeling too lazy that day to take my camera along).
Cyril crawling through one of those tight squeeze places you find in caves.
Leon in the same tight squeeze place.
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